LCA 2010 - Day 1

January brings with it the southern-hemisphere's summer and Linux.conf.au. This year, the conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Capital Cabal, a team of volunteer organisers lead by Susanne and Andrew Ruthven.

After a grey and wintery weekend, Wellington was all smiles for the first day of the conference. Situated at the Town Hall and Wellington Convention Centre close to the waterfront, sunshine, blue skies and balmy temperatures saw quite a few conference goers spending time outside exploring today.

This year's volunteers are numerous and helpful, and have done an amazing job of making the first day of LCA smoother than any other in memory. For the first time, the conference is being streamed live and streams can be accessed from the schedule on http://lca2010.org.nz. For me, just having the wireless working on day one was impressive enough.

The conference format is the same as previous years, with two days of mini-confs and then three days of conference proper. Monday's line up included:

Business of Open Source Miniconf
Open Programming Languages Miniconf
Wave Developers Miniconf
Haecksen and Linuxchix Miniconf
Libre Graphics Day
Arduino Miniconf
Distro Summit

I have always enjoyed the first day at LCA, catching up with people I've met at previous years and making new connections. Registration is always exciting with the traditional goodie bag to rifle through. Tuesday is when the sessions that pique my interest most start, with talks on systems administration and high-performance computing. I'm really looking forward to it, and from looking at how it's started, I really think this year's conference is going to be one of the best.